Might not be a good idea to drink the water until we find out for sure.
Well, liquid water is probably way below the surface if it exists at all. Everything else is probably ice.
Besides that, though, I wouldn't worry too much -- bacteria has to evolve to both take particular advantage of a host and to overcome that host's immune system. Even if you subscribe to the idea that terrestrial life may have traveled to Earth from Mars, chances are that even a Martian "cold" wouldn't be adaptible to modern humanity. There's just to big of an evolutionary gap.
But yeah, I'll admit that I think I'd still take a look under a microscope first if my drinking water hadn't been purified or manufactured.
Well, it's not necessarily water -- they're picking up hydrogen. It's just that hydrogen happens to be most easily stored as water. In any event, it's easy to make water if you have hydrogen and oxygen, assuming you're willing to spend the power to make it happen.
Now, on the other hand, if it turns out that spectrometry works differently on Mars than it does on Earth, we've got a lot bigger problems with that whole fundemental science thing.
Re:Now we know where to land
on
Lots of Ice On Mars
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The major advantage for Mars (aside from its carbon-dioxide atmosphere, and the recently confirmed water) is the gravity.
Whoa, slow down there, cowboy. The availablity of oxygen and hydrogen isn't just something to casually dismiss.
You put some sort of hard-to-break, long-lasting power source on the surface (nuclear battery or somesuch) and you can survive a lot of adversity when you have these sorts of raw materials. You can grow food in inflatible domes (most terrestrial crops would actually like the CO2 atmosphere of Mars better than our own), you can make air to breathe and you have water to drink. You can survive a really long time, even if Earth can't get you a supply ship for a few months (or years). Additionally, you can make rocket propellant, mix concrete and refine metals for your base, all using stuff you have laying around. Bury it all under a few meters of earth (er, mars) and you're safe from radiation thanks to the fact that Mars has an atmosphere running interference for you.
On the moon, if you rupture an air tank, you have to get into your lander and blast back to Earth pronto. The surface of Mars, on the other hand, could pretty easily be converted into the second safest place in the solar system.
Well, that *is* a lot of comments. I don't have quite that many, and my UID is a bit lower than yours.
I understand what you're saying, though. Asking the users of/. to pay might seem at first glance to be completely off-base, but it's not unprecidented -- I used to pay for subscriptions to chat BBS's that were only worthwhile because of the users. The forum is only valuable because of us, but it also only costs serious money because of us. That's life.
The only thing that's ever really pissed me off in relation to our contributions to this site is when Katz started using them to line his pocket a couple of years back -- that stupid hack couldn't geek his way out of a wet paper bag, so he starts stealing the writing of other people to make money? And Taco doesn't stand up against this? What the fuck does he bring here that I'm missing?
Anyway, that's my only gripe. I understand that Slashdot has to bring in money to stay up, but I really wish I could believe that's all we were subsidizing (and not contributing to VA's profit report), but that's been a closed issue for ages now.
Taco deserves props for putting Slashdot together in the first place; expecting him to be a Torvalds-type decision maker (aka: almost always right) seems to be a really overly high standard.
Not nearly as sexy as the custom-build case that was on here yesterday.
This is more in the realm of "too much time on my hands" -- it reminds me of that time in college when we slapped together a machine using an empty case from Leinenkugals (we got to drink the beer, too, which was a hefty side benefit).
Sure, people view computers as utilitarian, but that's only because that's how we've trained people to view them. With the proper application of marketing dollars, you can convince people that it's worth paying $200 for a pair of tennis shoes, for Christ's sake.
The point is, this doesn't happen by itself. It happens when a company recognizes the market and spends a whole shitload on the proper marketing -- ads, commercials, product placements, etc.
Remember: You're not selling a pretty case. You're selling the image.
I'm telling you: there's a huge market out there for designer computers. If you could put out machines that weren't beige boxes but which instead were hip, you'd find a huge market with the 20-somethings.
Apple made a run at this, and look how successful they were without running the mainstream Wintel setup.
People already routinely pay 500% more than they need to for clothes (ck), home furnishings (Pottery Barn), even sporting goods just because of the brand name and for the chance to be fashionable. I can't see why computers should be any different.
Pair this thing with a big flat-screen, a top-notch audio system and other similarly hip appointments, do some serious marketing, maybe brand it with known designer and I gaurantee you could sell these things for $5k each.
I could never really peg down why I disliked B5 so much. I mean, it had a lot of things going for it: a story arc, a vision of a flawed future where some aliens were more powerful than humans, etc.
But it *bugged* me. And it was beyond just the (extremely) crappy dialog, wooden acting and contrived plot happenings -- hell, if it were just that I wouldn't have liked TNG, either.
There was just something about the plot and characters that bothered the hell out of me, especially after JMS started writing all of the episodes. It got so bad that I would occassionally watch, but relied on episode guide websites to keep up with the happenings with the story arc.
Man, B5 bothered me. Yes, I'm aware that I sound a little on the neurotic side.
Newsflash: Even if a company is very interested in you, it's not at all uncommon for the interview and hiring process to take nearly a month. This isn't 1999 anymore; companies can take their time and do second interviews, interview multiple candidates, etc. If you try to be even mildly selective in where you work (for example, I want a company with reasonable long-term prospects), and it can stretch to a lot longer.
Besides, living off of unemployment isn't exactly easy. Unemployment only supplements my meger savings -- it only covers 2/3 of my rent, and I have a lot of other bills and car payments to boot.
You don't need a 4 wheel drive urban tank to get to point B from point A in a city.
Unless, of course, you live in the midwest during the wintertime. After driving my Dad's new (to him) Izusu Rodeo last Christmas, I'd never consider owning a two-wheel drive vehicle anyplace where there was significant snow for most of the year.
Look, you can make a reasonable SUV -- look at the efficiancy of the hybrids coming out this year. The real problem is the people who own really large vehicles (Excursions and the like) who don't need them. Notice the emphesis -- I have an aunt with five kids and an exchange student all trying to get places. She needs a big vehicle. The old woman who lives alone in the apartment next to mine here in Cali does not.
Figure out how to tax people who don't need big SUVs and I'll be happy.
Well, regardless of Grant's skills (or lack thereof) in the realm of bid'ness, the whole point I was making is that he wouldn't have written his memoirs if it hadn't been a way to provide for his family beyond his death.
Since the whole point of copyright is to give incentives to produce, this is pretty key. Without it, Grant wouldn't have turned out what are arguably some of the best war diaries in history.
U.S. Grant, formerly supreme US Army commander, five-star general and United States President, was completely broke before he died as a result of a bunch of lousy business deals.
To provide for his family, he wrote his memoirs while he was dying of throat cancer (those cigars are a bitch). So, the only reason he wrote them was to leave his family in good shape after he died.
Hey, I keep all my various recipes on my Palm -- useful when I get suckered into cooking when I'm not expecting it.
If nothing else, something like this would be really handy for nothing else that to give me a large LCD readout of my recipes. If, in addition, they could provide a set of, say, eight simultaneous programmable stopwatches so I wouldn't lose track of when various things were getting done, that'd be outright damned useful.
Besides, I already watch TV while I cook; cooking (or especially baking) has a nasty way of being a hurry-up-and-wait affair, and standing there staring at the clock gets old really quick.
While this isn't an all together unreasonable hazard in the long term, I think that we're in much more danger from ourselves than from Terminators in any sort of moderate-range view.
Should I waste my extra cycles fretting about Decepticons or John Ashcroft? No brainer -- at least Megatron was straight-forward and didn't use terrorists as an excuse for his self-serving actions.
The EMP assemblies I've seen take up a lot of space for relatively poor performace -- the entire cargo area of a minibus in exchange for making some monitors flicker. I'm sure this could be miniturized, but I think you'd need something pretty serious to cook a car's electronics.
If the arena's fairly small, you could use a couple of tanks of halon to give anyone using a gasoline engine a nasty shock -- suffocate the engine. Otherwise, I've seen a device in testing by the police that fires a contact under the chassis of a fleeing vehicle to make contact, hitting 'em with a jolt of juice. Car taser.
I assure you, watching a team saw a Land Rover in half triggers an entirely different response than watching a bunch of greased-up steroid cases yell at each other.
I mean, software development isn't CS in any sort of academic sense. There are many entry-points to software development, 'cause it's a discipline that requires what are basically technical skills and understanding of a set of concepts. It's not CS, it's not EE, etc.
Well, I'm a history grad (class of 2000), and these days I'm doing Release Management and ClearCase administration as my primary work.
I've found that I work best in environments where I'm given an assortment of tasks and left to my own devices. I spend a majority of my time on RM, but I also act as my boss's "go-to" guy. It's really nice 'cause it gives me leave to operate somewhat outside the normal chain of command in our engineering organization (I'm not senior to, say, the development lead, but I'm not *under* them, either).
Not sure if this would work outside of a mid-size startup, but it's something I enjoy. And it has very little to do with 19th century west-central Wisconsin farm communities.
Sales guys. Seriously, I've noticed that most of the really successful sales guys also tend to be a little, er, overinterested in that sort of thing.
I interned at a internal help desk at a major workstation maker. Mostly just "can't get my email" type stuff, but one time an engineer called and told me he had a "friend" who couldn't stop looking at porn at work. He was afraid of being discovered and getting fired, so he wanted a filter put on his machine to block out porn sites (no filter available; we used the company's UN*X boxes on the desktop, not Windows).
So, for some people it's a problem. For others... well, it's just them.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, liquid water is probably way below the surface if it exists at all. Everything else is probably ice.
Besides that, though, I wouldn't worry too much -- bacteria has to evolve to both take particular advantage of a host and to overcome that host's immune system. Even if you subscribe to the idea that terrestrial life may have traveled to Earth from Mars, chances are that even a Martian "cold" wouldn't be adaptible to modern humanity. There's just to big of an evolutionary gap.
But yeah, I'll admit that I think I'd still take a look under a microscope first if my drinking water hadn't been purified or manufactured.
Now, on the other hand, if it turns out that spectrometry works differently on Mars than it does on Earth, we've got a lot bigger problems with that whole fundemental science thing.
Whoa, slow down there, cowboy. The availablity of oxygen and hydrogen isn't just something to casually dismiss.
You put some sort of hard-to-break, long-lasting power source on the surface (nuclear battery or somesuch) and you can survive a lot of adversity when you have these sorts of raw materials. You can grow food in inflatible domes (most terrestrial crops would actually like the CO2 atmosphere of Mars better than our own), you can make air to breathe and you have water to drink. You can survive a really long time, even if Earth can't get you a supply ship for a few months (or years). Additionally, you can make rocket propellant, mix concrete and refine metals for your base, all using stuff you have laying around. Bury it all under a few meters of earth (er, mars) and you're safe from radiation thanks to the fact that Mars has an atmosphere running interference for you.
On the moon, if you rupture an air tank, you have to get into your lander and blast back to Earth pronto. The surface of Mars, on the other hand, could pretty easily be converted into the second safest place in the solar system.
I understand what you're saying, though. Asking the users of /. to pay might seem at first glance to be completely off-base, but it's not unprecidented -- I used to pay for subscriptions to chat BBS's that were only worthwhile because of the users. The forum is only valuable because of us, but it also only costs serious money because of us. That's life.
The only thing that's ever really pissed me off in relation to our contributions to this site is when Katz started using them to line his pocket a couple of years back -- that stupid hack couldn't geek his way out of a wet paper bag, so he starts stealing the writing of other people to make money? And Taco doesn't stand up against this? What the fuck does he bring here that I'm missing?
Anyway, that's my only gripe. I understand that Slashdot has to bring in money to stay up, but I really wish I could believe that's all we were subsidizing (and not contributing to VA's profit report), but that's been a closed issue for ages now.
Taco deserves props for putting Slashdot together in the first place; expecting him to be a Torvalds-type decision maker (aka: almost always right) seems to be a really overly high standard.
Maybe I've been out of college for too long, but the highest level of connectivity I've observed at most frats was the build-in beer taps.
This is more in the realm of "too much time on my hands" -- it reminds me of that time in college when we slapped together a machine using an empty case from Leinenkugals (we got to drink the beer, too, which was a hefty side benefit).
Go visit Crate & Barrel sometime.
Sure, people view computers as utilitarian, but that's only because that's how we've trained people to view them. With the proper application of marketing dollars, you can convince people that it's worth paying $200 for a pair of tennis shoes, for Christ's sake.
The point is, this doesn't happen by itself. It happens when a company recognizes the market and spends a whole shitload on the proper marketing -- ads, commercials, product placements, etc.
Remember: You're not selling a pretty case. You're selling the image.
I'd think the vibrations would cause drive problems...
Sheriden, Lyta and pretty much all the Minbari were the ones I couldn't stand watching.
I'm telling you: there's a huge market out there for designer computers. If you could put out machines that weren't beige boxes but which instead were hip, you'd find a huge market with the 20-somethings.
Apple made a run at this, and look how successful they were without running the mainstream Wintel setup.
People already routinely pay 500% more than they need to for clothes (ck), home furnishings (Pottery Barn), even sporting goods just because of the brand name and for the chance to be fashionable. I can't see why computers should be any different. Pair this thing with a big flat-screen, a top-notch audio system and other similarly hip appointments, do some serious marketing, maybe brand it with known designer and I gaurantee you could sell these things for $5k each.
But it *bugged* me. And it was beyond just the (extremely) crappy dialog, wooden acting and contrived plot happenings -- hell, if it were just that I wouldn't have liked TNG, either.
There was just something about the plot and characters that bothered the hell out of me, especially after JMS started writing all of the episodes. It got so bad that I would occassionally watch, but relied on episode guide websites to keep up with the happenings with the story arc.
Man, B5 bothered me. Yes, I'm aware that I sound a little on the neurotic side.
You have a problem with this?
Newsflash: Even if a company is very interested in you, it's not at all uncommon for the interview and hiring process to take nearly a month. This isn't 1999 anymore; companies can take their time and do second interviews, interview multiple candidates, etc. If you try to be even mildly selective in where you work (for example, I want a company with reasonable long-term prospects), and it can stretch to a lot longer.
Besides, living off of unemployment isn't exactly easy. Unemployment only supplements my meger savings -- it only covers 2/3 of my rent, and I have a lot of other bills and car payments to boot.
So fuck you.
My guess? You don't have to drive up a steep hill every day like I did to get home.
Unless, of course, you live in the midwest during the wintertime. After driving my Dad's new (to him) Izusu Rodeo last Christmas, I'd never consider owning a two-wheel drive vehicle anyplace where there was significant snow for most of the year.
Look, you can make a reasonable SUV -- look at the efficiancy of the hybrids coming out this year. The real problem is the people who own really large vehicles (Excursions and the like) who don't need them. Notice the emphesis -- I have an aunt with five kids and an exchange student all trying to get places. She needs a big vehicle. The old woman who lives alone in the apartment next to mine here in Cali does not.
Figure out how to tax people who don't need big SUVs and I'll be happy.
Since the whole point of copyright is to give incentives to produce, this is pretty key. Without it, Grant wouldn't have turned out what are arguably some of the best war diaries in history.
U.S. Grant, formerly supreme US Army commander, five-star general and United States President, was completely broke before he died as a result of a bunch of lousy business deals.
To provide for his family, he wrote his memoirs while he was dying of throat cancer (those cigars are a bitch). So, the only reason he wrote them was to leave his family in good shape after he died.
If nothing else, something like this would be really handy for nothing else that to give me a large LCD readout of my recipes. If, in addition, they could provide a set of, say, eight simultaneous programmable stopwatches so I wouldn't lose track of when various things were getting done, that'd be outright damned useful.
Besides, I already watch TV while I cook; cooking (or especially baking) has a nasty way of being a hurry-up-and-wait affair, and standing there staring at the clock gets old really quick.
Should I waste my extra cycles fretting about Decepticons or John Ashcroft? No brainer -- at least Megatron was straight-forward and didn't use terrorists as an excuse for his self-serving actions.
The EMP assemblies I've seen take up a lot of space for relatively poor performace -- the entire cargo area of a minibus in exchange for making some monitors flicker. I'm sure this could be miniturized, but I think you'd need something pretty serious to cook a car's electronics.
If the arena's fairly small, you could use a couple of tanks of halon to give anyone using a gasoline engine a nasty shock -- suffocate the engine. Otherwise, I've seen a device in testing by the police that fires a contact under the chassis of a fleeing vehicle to make contact, hitting 'em with a jolt of juice. Car taser.
I assure you, watching a team saw a Land Rover in half triggers an entirely different response than watching a bunch of greased-up steroid cases yell at each other.
Bah, it'd be a lot more cool if they have ten hours to build the machine in the junkyard.
I mean, software development isn't CS in any sort of academic sense. There are many entry-points to software development, 'cause it's a discipline that requires what are basically technical skills and understanding of a set of concepts. It's not CS, it's not EE, etc.
That's like saying that pre-med courses are useless, 'cause you can't do anything with just it. Poli sci degrees need some grad work to be useful.
I've seen several people use it as a starting point for some quite interesting careers.
I've found that I work best in environments where I'm given an assortment of tasks and left to my own devices. I spend a majority of my time on RM, but I also act as my boss's "go-to" guy. It's really nice 'cause it gives me leave to operate somewhat outside the normal chain of command in our engineering organization (I'm not senior to, say, the development lead, but I'm not *under* them, either).
Not sure if this would work outside of a mid-size startup, but it's something I enjoy. And it has very little to do with 19th century west-central Wisconsin farm communities.
Sales guys. Seriously, I've noticed that most of the really successful sales guys also tend to be a little, er, overinterested in that sort of thing.
I interned at a internal help desk at a major workstation maker. Mostly just "can't get my email" type stuff, but one time an engineer called and told me he had a "friend" who couldn't stop looking at porn at work. He was afraid of being discovered and getting fired, so he wanted a filter put on his machine to block out porn sites (no filter available; we used the company's UN*X boxes on the desktop, not Windows).
So, for some people it's a problem. For others... well, it's just them.